Monday: January 7, 2013

The new wristbands will work in tandem with a new Disney app that you can use on your smartphone. The wristband (officially called MagicBand) can be used as your rooom key, theme park ticket, photopass, payment information and even access to FastPass for quicker access to rides and attractions. So long Key to the World cards!

Tuesday: December 18, 2012

The answer is that most of the coders behind today’s popular websites and services are deploying their code when it’s ready—not at some pre-determined point when downtime may not be noticed. It’s called continuous code deployment, or some variation on that theme, and everyone from Facebook and Netflix to smaller services do it. While it may occasionally cause a few blips, those blips should be shorter and less catastrophic.

Wednesday: November 9, 2011

If you haven't seen Microsoft's video entailing what they think the future of technology holds, you should watch it (readily available on source URL as an embedded clip). So watch that video and then read Victor's thoughts on the matter. That being said, I do have a minor point of contention. I did get some hands-on time with a Kinect-enabled Xbox 360 this past weekend and it was a fun, dare I say, semi-magical experience. I highly reccomend Double Fine's Once Upon a Monster (even the demo is fun).

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations.

Thursday: August 11, 2011

Canadian indie developer Hothead Games is producing a Hitchhikers Guide app, aiming to replicate the titular guide itself (rather than the novels). When it arrives this fall, we can expect beautifully animated sequences describing the Babel Fish and Vogon Poetry -- but just a single word about planet Earth (the addition of the word 'Mostly' should come in a second, more sinister update).

The new Apple cube will sport only fifteen panes of glass as opposed to the previous use of a whopping ninety panes of glass. The cost of upgrading their iconic glass cube on Fifth Avenue? Just a mere $6.6 million bucks, which in reality is actually chump change for Apple. If you're interested in the technology behind how these giant peices of glass are actually made MacRumors points to this article over on ifoAppleStore.com.

Wednesday: August 3, 2011

Andy Gavin has written a post with a behind the scenes video from HBO's Game of Thrones depicting how most of the locations are built using modern CGI and clever scouting. If you've watched the show (and I highly recommend that you do) some of the per-CGI moments in the video may actually take you by surprise, once you see their post-CGI counterparts.

Friday: July 15, 2011

It's not every day that you get to see a phone booth murdered in the name of art. This and other interesting bits of eye candy can be viewed over on the source article by way of the folks over at WebUrbanist. The melted ice cream truck half-way down the page get's the runner up award in my book. My favorite is the 900-pound box man, it reminds of the near-impossible yellow boss you had to beat before Dr. Wiley in Mega Man.

Friday: July 8, 2011

I had a chance to try this out last night and I liked the experience. The new design seems to take a couple cues from Hulu and other video sites by utilizing a darker background to make the video pop more. The other neat thing is that the comments will scroll while keeping the video locked to the top of screen and in view. That is surely a welcome change for those who enjoy reading inane YouTube comments. You can try it out for yourself over yonder.

Thursday: July 7, 2011

Lately I've noticed that I've somehow found myself on a great deal of sites that have their own form of instant messaging clients. Facebook has one, Google has one, and then there's that ancient AIM account that I can never seem to let go of. The problem is that...